Last week on the way home from work I went into a local CD/DVD retailer to see if they had anything on sale that I was interested in. In the event they didn't have the DVD I was looking for, but they did have a CD promotion on.
There were a few CDs that looked interesting, but to get the best deal I needed to get three disks for the best price. I wasn't interested enough to buy the any of the disks at their individual price.
After browsing for a few minutes I spotted a album I thought would be nice. To my horror it was some BMG "copy protected thing" and not a CD at all. According to the tiny text label it will work on all audio devices, and on PCs running Widows - but not other computers. Seeing as I don't use Windows at home anymore, and I don't trust a disk that isn't certified with the CD logo, I walked out having bought nothing.
I then sent an email to HMV complaining that the copy protected disk was mixed in with genuine CDs, and that they should put it in another part of the shop. To my surprise they actually did reply, and though they did think about their response for more than a nano second, it's clear that they don't understand my request that they separate genuine CDs from corrupt ones.
My next challenge is to email BMG in the UK and the local trading standards office. I'm sure BMG will waffle on about protecting quality, or piracy, but I will make it clear that they lost business because of their stupidity. The trading standards will I'm sure claim that they have cowboy traders to deal with and in the scheme of things it's not that important, but again I will have made an entry in a file somewhere - possibly labelled "cranks".
In no way do I support counterfeiting goods, or unlicensed duplication, however I think I have the right to play my music where I want, and they shouldn't market something as a CD when it is not, and it will not play properly on all genuine CD replay devices.
According to The Campaign For Digital Rights the album I wanted, doesn't play on some DVD players, some car CD players and a Philips CD player. It doesn't play reliably even on Windows, and it's unsupported on Linux/Mac et al. — though some people have been able to rip tracks by-passing the corruption.
